I was on the bus- across from me, A young woman was, idiosyncratically, just begining to bear fruit in her attempts to settle down her two children by reading to them from a small picturebook. She was also, I noticed, keeping a covert eye on the hungry looking man openly probing her attentiveness and her loaded grocery bags, hoping to slip an apple through during a moment of distraction.

Her physical beauty was striking, though the fact that she reading to her children, (which I understood as the kind of masterful, deft, intuitive bit of psycho manipulation that begins in an unconditional love and ends with an alphabet soup of titular honorifics crowding the child’s name line on future official documents) which empowered an alien confidence enough so that when I found myself standing slightly behind her, I leaned in close to her ear and whispered clearly, “ You are Beautiful.”

I steeled myself in expectation of her reaction… I figured it warrented anything from the bright hot moment of a slap in the face to a double pronged assault of spanish invective and shameful uncomprehension, and was made increasingly weak in the knees watching as she, without turning around, was useless in stopping the instant upward twitch of her lips or the blush-fire that lit and spread and deepened and would only relinquish her complexion in deescalating pulses, flaring scandalously with every reluctant quantum leap…

Today, years later, I can think of nothing else, absolutely nothing else at all, that I would have preferred to have been given as her reaction.